9h30 – “Ok, let’s do the stand up!”

Between five to 10 people promptly gather around the whiteboard every morning and give updates on their work, raise flags when they are blocked or when they need help… who is to say that agile projects are chaotic?

For the past couple of months, I have been working on a long-term project that has been managed in an “agile” way, and have discovered many pros and some cons along the way. The biggest success, from my perspective at least, is to see how easily you can implement a user-centered design approach into an agile development environment if a few factors come together:

• There is a general understanding amongst the team members that producing a usable and pleasing product is a top priority.
• The analysis phase is not skipped in the process and time is allowed to really understand the business rules, users and their context of use.
• The user experience (UX) always works one or two sprints ahead while verifying work done in the previous one and discussing implementation questions for the current one.

Below is a diagram I created that illustrates the last point and explains how UX and development collaborate across the sprints:

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Remember “Girls just wanna have fun”? Well, this  turns out to be a universal truth, applicable not just to girls but also to business application users. Of course, I am exaggerating slightly, but we are seeing increasingly playful features in project management tools, CRMs, and other collaborative tools. So what makes a business application more fun for the user?

In my opinion, there are 5 core elements that can make business applications more engaging:

1. Attractive visual display: An attractive but discrete color palette, a clean, uncluttered layout and beautiful iconography help the users to feel at ease and quickly capture the nature of the content. The often oversized icons also give a playful impression, even though you might be dealing with something quite “dull”, such as project management. Basecamp is a good example for that kind of design and I  have also used that approach in a recent project for a private bank.
2. Immediate feedback: Technologies such as AJAX and Flex allow us to give the user immediate feedback upon their actions. Filling out forms is a great example that provides a challenge: How to turn something that most people apprehend and find boring into a pleasant activity? You can display a green check for fields filled in correctly – the user feels successful and good about themselves. You can also hide and display information as it becomes relevant in the process. Again, the user feels in charge and can “play” with the interface.
3. User generated content: As wikis and micro blogging are catching ground in the business world, features that allow users to contribute are become more accepted and appreciated. From a user experience perspective, it also means that the users move from being mere recipients of information to  active contributors, and enjoy publishing their opinions in such an easy way.
4. Ratings and progress indicators: It seems fundamental to human nature that we seek all kinds of measurements  and thrive on positive ones. When LinkedIn added a little meter above the users’ information to show how complete their profile was in percent, the number of users completing their profile increased significantly.
5. Elements of delight: Now here’s the icing on the cake: suprise users with the unexpected, put a smile on their faces. Google has tried this for a while (it may be getting a bit old by now) by changing it’s logo for special days, e.g.  Harry Houdini’s 137th birthday today!?). But what does this mean for business applications? A good example is drag&drop. Lets say you have a tool where you have to assign projects to programs and programs to intiatives (based again on a recent project of ours). You could have a traditional  form based interface, but you could also imagine arranging these items in a more visual “mind-mapping” way. Which way would be more fun? And which way might offer a more meaningful visualization?

This is all very nice, but why should the business owner care? First, because web 2.0ish web sites, playstations, iphone / pad applications and the likes have dramatically raised the bar of users’ expectations in terms of ease of use and entertainment value.  In other words, you snooze, you lose. Second, providing applications that are enjoyable to use will give a positive image of the company in general.  And finally, because these elements, if executed well and adopted to the users’ needs,  will undoubtedly increase user participation and adoption. So, just to close the loop, they should be a bit more subtle than Cyndi Lauper, if you know what I mean!

While doing my grocery shopping, I was recently intrigued by a brand new interface to weigh your fruit and veggies at a Migros in France. Instead of having to memorize up to 3 digit numbers and keying them in, they had a very intuitive touch screen interface that immediately made me think of the Web. You select your category and get a visual display of your fruit or vegetables. Of course, this requires that you know the difference between fruit and vegetables; but don’t try to be too clever:  Migros assumes most people do not know that tomatoes are actually fruit.

Old version:

The old version (currently still the one used in the Migros stores I visit in the Geneva area) is one designed for expert users, meaning the clerks working in the store. They will have memorized most of the numbers and this  is the quickest way to proceed with the operation – if you know what you’re doing. The rest of us have to refer to the list above, or, if your item happens to be missing from the list, run back to where you picked it up, memorize the number, key it in and ignore the frowns of other waiting customers.

In comparison, the new version seems very intuitive and familiar to me, mostly because of its simple and straight-forward design. It involves one extra click, but it’s a quick one that doesn’t require much brain capacity – of which, let’s face it, we don’t have any left when hunting and gathering in the supermarket just before closing time!

New version:

Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the amount of information, the diversity of product offers or the multitude of choices to make? One option is to rely on recommendations of a friend or opinions of other users. Another mechanism is scarcity. Indeed, we attribute a lot of value to things of limited availability or that are being promoted as scarce. It’s an old advertising principle: “This category is sold out, 14 remaining of that one”. Hurry, or you’ll be too late. And who wants to lag behind?

If we transfer this principle to Human computer interaction, it makes sense to limit the options because scarecity may enforce quality! A good example is “Foodspotting”, a community site where food lovers can post their favorite dishes they took pictures of. The twist is that  you have limited “awards” to hand out and you have to earn them by being an active member of the community. Result? You can assume that the dishes with high ranking on this site are really worth the detour.

Another well-known example of scarcity is the famous 140 character limitation imposed by twitter, (originally due to SMS limitations) which has generated entire seminars around the question on how to best formulate your tweets to reach your target audience.

Imagine if people on Facebook could only give one “I like it” per day…wouldn’t that be a lot more meaningful than what we have today?

There has been lots of discussion in the UX community about the compatibility or not of  Agile development and the principles of user centered design. The fact that developers are aiming to produce something fast in small iterations can have a scary note to it – best captured in Alan Cooper’s book  The Inmates are running the Asylum.

In my experience, rapid development is not a bad thing at all – if it comes embedded in a well-managed project with well-defined strategy and scope.

I first came across “Agile” when I worked for a software company in California (Niku, now part of Computer Associates). After the burst of the bubble and a couple of rounds of lay-offs, the CEO went around distributing copies of Extreme Programming. This happened in an organisation that had had a PMO (gone), Product Managers (gone), Marketing (almost gone), and a full-blown web development team with producers, usability engineers, designers and front-end developers (only 3 remained).

The result was quite astonishing: development was streamlined with automated nightly builds (no more: “but it worked on my machine”), usability issues where addressed on the fly and tested with whoever happened to walk down the hallway, and most importantly, customer requests were prioritized and features added or dropped based on their needs. As a result, we were able to get a number of releases out in record time while working in very tight collaboration amongst ourselves and with our clients.

A couple of things played in favor of  such an agile development effort:

• Small teams
• Senior and experienced people
• A general roadmap and strategy in place
• UI patterns well defined and documented

However, in order to have a  roadmap and strategy in place as well as a well-defined concept, the mantra of “doing your homework first” is more valid than ever:

• Research user needs and context
• Evaluate competitive landscape
• Assess business goals and objectives and
• Create an overall concept in form of sitemap, process flows, wireframes, etc..

As with building a house, you want to get the foundations right – or any extension done later on will look like the picture above!

In the age of AADO – adult attention deficit order – conveying information by means of images and videos becomes more and more crucial. One of the leaders in the area of Infographics is the New York Times online, who employs a whole staff of talented  designers and thinkers.

Recently, in the Opinion section, I came across one of the funniest blogs in a long time, and it was almost purely visual. Now, it helps to have kids to get the full meaning out of it, but I’ll let you be the judges:

http://niemann.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/good-night-and-tough-luck/

A "napkin scetch"

Wireframes are the backbone of any successful web or software project. Information architects create wireframes to provide a visual schema on how pages are put and linked together without specifying a visual identity. Similar to the architectural blueprints for a building, wireframes constitute the common understanding between the client, business analyst, designers and developers.

Seeing is believing

During the concept phase, wireframes help to visualize ideas and get everybody involved. Tools such as Visio allow information architects to quickly create click-through scenarios to simulate possible interactions with the future application.

Stakeholders are busy people. They will not read lengthy functional specifications and are unlikely to page through detailed presentations. But they will look at screen mockups and storyboards. The use of wireframes is a time-saver. Instead of waiting for months before seeing actual screens, stakeholders get a sneak preview almost immediately. A client once told me after a three-day intensive workshop: “This is amazing! Prior to working with you, we waited for six months to see actual pages, and when we finally did, they were not at all what we had asked for.”

Reducing time = saving money

Wireframes can save you very costly rework at a much later stage in the development process. Making fundamental changes during the development phase may cost a lot, with an outcome that is often uncertain. Paper, on the other hand, is patient – and cheap. Changes are easily made. In fact, good user experience design relies on an iterative process involving different team members as well as feedback from the end users.

Wireframe in visio

Getting the team on one page

Early paper prototyping also helps with internal communication and productivity.

• Designers are able to quickly mock-up the visual identity and enhance the user experience without wasting time thinking about data, page flow, and business scenarios.
• Content providers can easily visualize the placement and space for their copy.
• Developers may use the prototype to give more accurate estimates for development time and to raise potential flags in terms of feasibility or performance.

During the development phase, the wireframes serve as a quick reference and reduce the chances of misinterpreting functional requirements.

Last but not least, wireframes facilitate early usability testing, which will reveal potential issues with page flow, layout, nomenclature, or functionality. As discussed previously on Agile Usability Testing, this can be done very quickly at low cost and will provide valuable insight into the users’ minds.

Social networking tools are here to stay, and grow. According to Forrester Research, enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies will grow strongly over the next five years, reaching $4.6 billion globally by 2013, with social networking, mashups, and RSS capturing the greatest share.

Forrester Research Forecast on enterprise 2.0 spending

What makes these new tools so attractive to the corporate world? Is everybody starting to get sucked into the virtual world, building avatars, blogging, twitting and exposing themselves in one form or another? The truth is probably much more pragmatic.

Functional Specs in a wiki

Take an exemple from the software development world: functional specifications. You could write a heavy duty word document of a couple of 100 pages, insert screen captures made in visio to illustrate the screens and process flows, send out new version update alerts so that everybody is kept on the same page (so to speak)

…or: you use a wiki. Cross-references are made easily, and components are only explained once. Different people can collaborate together on the specifications at the same time, since it’s just one page and not the whole document that gets locked. Issues can be discussed and resolved in the context of the screen or schema. The whole structure can evolve over time and everybody can be sure to be looking at the latest version. It also helps tremendiously when you have a team that works remotely. Having experienced both worlds, there is no doubt for me that the wiki rules!